Origami phoenix: 10 hours, 1361 folds

Since we had a post on origami yesterday, alert reader Myxoldian called our attention in a comment to origami master Satoshi Kamiya, who fashions paper animals, real and imaginary. In this video Kamiya takes ten hours to fold a phoenix out of a single large, uncut piece of paper, a task requiring 1361 folds.

You can see Kamiya’s other origami work here. Click on the black-and-white images to see the work large and in color. Here’s one of his works, a lion:

That’s for folding something in half, then half again, then half again–in a geometric progression of thicknesses. That is different than the number of creases in an origami model.

The model really is spectacular. I’ve seen examples of similar complexity on the cover of fancy origami books that contain no instructions. I never knew how long such models took–and that is by someone who is an expert. Even with complete instructions it would take me weeks to make an inferior version.

Hmmm, I’m sitting here looking at rocks in southern Tanzania, pretty close to the homeland of humankind. Gate security on the site is provided by a cadre of Masai (from pretty much on top of the Olduvai Gorge). While I doubt that my beer-bellied form could effectively run down and capture a gazelle, it’s a racing certainty that one or two of the Masai cadre could do so, operating in concert if necessary.
The big cats, in fact cats without exception that I can think of, are ambush and sprint hunters ; Homo seems to be, in significant part, a cursorial endurance hunter with profound adaptations to pack living and pack hunting.
Off the top of the head, I can’t recall how many of the world’s records for long-distance running are held by people from this part of the world, but it’s a lot. Given the distribution of population, it’s probably disproportionately many.